Category: Letter from Cairo

To be honest, I have to admit that I actually heard the expression “supra-constitutional” before in reference to international human rights laws, which are believed to transcend the constitutions of countries. This basically meant that conventions stating the basic rights any human being should be granted regardless of which country he/she comes from should be endowed with a higher status than individual constitutions and which might focus on issues mostly pertaining to this specific country. So, if your country’s constitution in does not explicitly mention that you are, for example, entitled to a dignified treatment regardless of race, religion, or class, you are not deprived of this right since by virtue of being human you fall under the jurisdiction of international treaties presumably created for safeguarding this species. Whether this really provides you with any kind of protection and whether the country you come from finds its own constitution binding to start with is not of great help as far as trying to find a meaning for “supra-constitution” is concerned.

The above-mentioned definition presents the “supra-constitution” as a noble attempt to create a universal shelter for all the inhabitants of the planet and to place human rights above all border-bound constitutions and politically-oriented laws. Not exactly realistic, but definitely commonsensical. Any sane person, and I claim to be one, would perfectly understand the rationale behind such a holistic approach to humanity, but would miserably fail to fathom how one single country can have two constitutions—one “supra” and another “infra.” Actually, the latter does not even exist and only God knows when and if it will see the light.

Like the birth of freaks is accompanied by turbulent acts of nature, several paranormal incidents heralded the inception of the “supra-constitution.” It all started with the referendum on a bunch of constitutional amendments, the most important of which concerned the writing of the constitution. According to the new article, which was approved together with the entire bouquet—people said “yes” or “no” to all the amendments and not to one by one—the constitution is to be written by a committee of 100 parliament members to be elected also by parliament members. The question that popped up right there and then was: What members? Which parliament? We didn’t have the second, so logically the first was nowhere to be found. But came the answer: The new elected parliament. So the elections will take place without a constitution? Indeed. Aren’t a couple of amendments enough to walk the country through something as minor as parliamentary elections? Of course they are.

And Egypt, thereby, welcomed the Constitutional Declaration, the name given to the document approved by 77 percent of the voters. Let me point out that the referendum was on nine articles, but we were so good to be rewarded with 63. Let me also point out that the outcome of the vote was the fruit of a relentless campaign launched by Islamists in which average people were brainwashed into believing that disapproving of the amendments would mean writing a constitution from scratch and therefore removing Article 2 that makes Islam the official religion and Islamic law the main source of legislation, which will of course be immediately followed by canceling Islam from Egypt and forcing Egyptians to convert to Buddhism and imposing fines on citizens who abstain from eating pork! It never occurred to the 14-plus million who said “yes” that Islamists wanted to make sure they stand the biggest chance of forming this committee and were counting on administering an intensive Islam-is-under-attack dose that would certainly win them a parliamentary majority. At that time I asked myself a simple question: If using religious slogans is illegal in elections, shouldn’t the same apply to referenda? Apparently not! Somebody wanted those who said “no” to religious manipulation and who saw no alternative to a civil state to cower in fright as they see the specter of a theocracy looming in the horizon and cry out for help. I went crazy trying to guess who!

Well, that kind of worked. The Constitution First campaign betrayed a great deal of nervousness on the part of liberals who looked to have suddenly realized that their chances of taking part in writing the constitution were diminishing by the minute. It was then that they insisted the constitution be drafted before the elections by a committee that includes all sectors and classes in the Egyptian society. Too late, Islamists scoffed as they accused their opponents of revoking the results of a democratic process in which the people chose how they want the constitution to be written. I can’t blame them. I would have never missed such an easy and logical — quite a rare combination—chance for the whole world and I would have definitely flashed the democracy card in their faces and maybe even stuck my tongue at them.

It looked like a dead end. The Supreme Council for the Armed Forces could not just cancel the result of the referendum at the time it claimed to be the sole guardian of the Egyptian revolution and the heroic advocate of democracy, but it could still take into its arms those scared children and rock them to sleep with a little lullaby: “Close your eyes and have no fear. The monster’s gone; he’s on the run, and mommy’s here!” Another little document can do the job. It’s pretty simple. Let’s just tamper with one little article in the Constitutional Declaration and make a tiny change in the number of its members from the parliament so instead of 100 they will only drop to 20. The remaining 80 will be chosen to cover the whole spectrum of the Egyptian society through including representatives of 20 different sectors like the judiciary, university professors, trade unions, businessmen, farmers, Muslim and Christian clergy, and guess who? The Armed Forces. Who chooses those representatives? Too much guessing I suppose!

But this violates the provisional constitution and breaks the rules according to which the permanent constitution will be written and disregards the referendum about the constitution. What has this gotten to do with that anyway? This is a “supra-constitution” and this is how we might arrive at a potential definition. A “supra-constitution” is a document where you add articles that are not in the constitution and twist or annul or reinterpret articles that are in the constitution and, by virtue of being “above” the constitution, it is not subject to referenda and such trivial processes that only make people fight. It can also contain some articles about human dignity, freedom of expression, faith, and movement, the protection of individual property, the right to a clean environment and a proper education and similar principles that make the document look as “supra-constitutional” as human rights organizations meant when they started using the term and that should make us the one self-sufficient country in which any universal statute is rendered absolutely unnecessary.

It will also contain the price, the terms of the allegiance you will forever pledge to the makers of the “supra-constitution” for allaying your fears and appeasing the likes of you who dread the day Egypt will be an Islamic state: The Supreme Council for the Armed Forces is untouchable. You have the right to form a civil state, but you will forever remember that your loyalty stays with the army; you have the freedom to file lawsuits and protest corruption and promote democracy, but are absolutely prohibited from looking into issues related to army including the budget, which is to feature as one entry and one single digit in the state budget, and any legislation related to the army. The civil president needs to take the approval of the military council before declaring war. The council also becomes authorized to form a new committee to draft the constitution in case the first one fails to do so or in case the constitution it comes up with violates the Constitutional Declaration which the council is violating at this very moment … Oops! Forgot the “supra-constitution” is entitled to violate as it may. Sorry, I and my stupid fellow-Egyptians will need some training on that!

I remember one time our beloved bygone president once gave the Egyptian people the choice between his regime and chaos, the latter always used to denote Islamist rule. Now our beloved seemingly-never-to-be-bygone army is giving us the choice between full military control and the same kind of chaos.

I guess now I understand what or who “supra” refers to and I am sure I have absolutely no clue what “constitution” is supposed to mean.

However, there are always times when you smash that mirror into pieces the moment you realize how ugly your face is and how unready you are to accept this revelation for a fact. The fool was never utterly safe and all the privileges he might be envied for by all those unable to direct the slightest blame at the king could in a spilt of a second bring about his destruction. The king might present his fool as mentally deficient and might pretend that he did not take his words seriously, but deep down he knew how perfectly sane the fellow was and how dexterously he used — and at time overused or even abused — the license given to him to lash out at his master. Like any despot who would rather exterminate all his people than have any of them expose him for what he really was, the king’s tolerance could wear thin when the assault was too much to take even from a man generally considered out of his mind and the time might come when he struck back with corporal punishment, banishment, or even death.

Let me also tell you that with all the space the fool was given to criticize the king, he was not really at liberty to do so whenever he felt like it, for he had other tasks to perform like dancing, singing, and telling jokes and he was basically there to entertain the king, which becomes obvious in the clown-like costumes he was known to wear. This entertainment might at times take the form of personal advice or political commentary, but only when the king’s mood permitted it to be so. This means that if the king embarked on some reckless action that he knew very well would infuriate his people and court alike and might even be detrimental to the entire kingdom yet that he is adamant on doing, he might order the only person who would tell him to his face how stupid he was to mimic the mating call of the wild boar or to jump around the throne like a baby orangutan. And in no time, the sage turns into a pet.

History never ceases to repeat itself and only wise nations benefit from humanity’s past experiences and that is exactly what the current regime of Egypt is doing as it is apparently seeing the merits of bringing back to a country taking heavy toddler steps towards democracy a tradition that offers the ideal example of creating a semblance of freedom and programming its spokespeople to talk only when they are given permission and to shut up or let out any kind of gibberish when their talk becomes too critical to be tolerated and too true to be voiced.

For some odd reason, the arrest of Egyptian blogger Alaa Abdel-Fattah took me back in time to the era of court fools as I suddenly realized that this is what the Higher Council for the Armed Forces is trying to create of those activists who mistakenly interpreted the freedom they have been given following the revolution to be limitless and who felt too safe to see detention, military trials, and charges of incitement coming their way.

Unfortunately, Abdel-Fattah was not a trained fool for he didn’t know when he should stop and was not aware of the consequences of pissing the king off. He was unable to make the distinction between criticizing the army for the way it runs the country or the lack of a clear time frame for the transition of power on one hand and accusing the army of murdering civilians and hijacking the revolution on the other hand. That was the line any professional fool would have never crossed and that was the time he would have identified as solely dedicated to dim-witted jokes and acrobatic stunts.

Alaa Abdel-Fattah is no such “fool” and neither are his fellow activists nor any of the Egyptian revolutionaries. None of those will dance around the king while he is dragging the kingdom to its doom for then they will be busy uprooting that throne he mistook to be eternal and making sure he realizes that it is only thanks to them he is sitting there, that pets are not always friendly, and that fools are always labeled as such only by those who most deserve this designation and spare no effort to earn it.

A touch of transparency was also necessary at a moment that detrimental to the image of the U.S. in front of the International Community and it was then the turn of the big man, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who in an impressive show of honesty announced the presence of more pictures and videos that show the different types of abuse Iraqi prisoners were subjected to and it was actually the Pentagon that showed them. And because retribution is the only way a sin might be forgiven, this was followed by a spat of court martial trials and prison sentences for those directly involved in the practice of torture and dishonorable discharge or demotion for those implicated by virtue of political responsibility. Bottom line was whether or not you think the abuses were approved, explicitly or tacitly, by the U.S. administration was beside the point, for all the denouncing statements, the public apologies, and the prompt punishments presented the superpower as the perfect democracy that does not hesitate to impose the strictest of penalties on its own citizens the moment they are proven to have deviated from the moral path it has charted for itself and for the rest of the world. You would know that those soldiers, sadist as they were, were sheer scapegoats that had to be sacrificed for the nobler cause of acquitting good old America from the most disgraceful charge that can be leveled at a country that labels itself democratic: double standards.

And till this very moment, Abu Ghraib remains the biggest skeleton in the United States’ war on terror closet, but no one can deny that they have done their best to keep it locked in.

When the picture of a 28-year-old Egyptian man with a fractured skull, a broken nose, a dislocated jaw, and a disfigured face were all over the internet, officials assumed that all Egyptians are either blind or stupid or both and insisted that the deceased was not subjected to any sort of torture and that he died after swallowing a bag of marijuana for fear of being caught by the police. Of course, the widely-circulated and more logical version of the story ─ that he was beaten to death for having in his possession a video that showed police officers dealing in drugs ─ was officially dismissed as the product of the sick imagination of a few delinquents who are out to destabilize national security serve foreign agendas. Anyone who had the slightest doubt could always go back to the fabricated forensic report to make sure none of this gibberish held water. Only after the regime was ousted did the brave young man, who was amongst the main triggers of the revolution, get a proper chance to be vindicated and with the first report discarded and another issued stating that the marijuana bag was indeed forced down his throat and that he was brutally beaten, a sigh of relief was let out by the millions awaiting the final act of justice. Too soon it seemed, for while first-degree murder sounded like the most logical charge, the two policemen were found guilty of manslaughter and while nothing less than a life sentence felt like a fair verdict, they got seven years each.

Khaled Saeid will forever haunt the Egyptian regime both before and after the revolution and will forever remain a symbol of a dictatorship that brazenly washes its hands of the blood of the very victims it kills in cold blood.

When a 24-year-old Egyptian prisoner was announced dead after brutal torture by the guards for smuggling a mobile phone SIM card into his cell and after eyewitnesses confirmed he was sodomized, beaten, and forced to drink detergents through a tube inserted in his mouth, the same template was flashed in the face of despondent Egyptians who had not yet gotten over the absurd verdict that a few days before equated pre-determined murder with pick-pocketing. Once again, the victim turned out to have been poisoned after swallowing an overdose of narcotics. The circumstances in which the autopsy took place and the integrity of those who carried it out remain a mystery that will probably be solved after the next revolution … or not.

The death of Essam Atta is the unfortunate proof that little has changed and the cruel lesson that Egyptians should not expect an apology because they do not deserve one and because whoever governs them owes them nothing whatsoever.

While torture remains the easiest and fastest way of dealing with a wide range of problems for both, democracies take the time and effort to embellish the ugliest of truths and to emerge repentant in the very situations they had no scruples about a few minutes before they were made public while dictatorships feel they need not go through the hassle simply because atrocities are their middle name and there is no reason why anyone should be shocked when they are committed or why anyone should expect the wrong to be righted when it is revealed.

You are screwed anyway, but who screws you is what makes the difference. You either get an apology or you are told to go to hell. None heals the scars nor brings back the dead, but one makes you live in the illusion of democracy while the other keeps welcoming you to dark dungeons of dictatorship.

When clashes erupted around this place and parts of the protest was transferred to the front of the building, they apparently found nowhere else in Egypt to do the job, so they explored other realms of farcical performances. That was when people began speaking on air about foreigners in the square inciting Egyptians against their democratically elected government and tempting them with truckloads of Euros and boxes of Kentucky Fried Chicken. One such caller has become quite an icon because he kept whining for a good 10 minutes to one of the news presenters about how the square was infested with English speakers who were set to destroy the country and claim it was a revolution. The faked anxiety on the presenter’s face after hearing the testimony of what he labeled an Egyptian who got to know what was really happening “inside” firsthand – inside” being Tahrir Square – and the equally lousy part gay, part I-want-mommy act was one thing, and the stunning revelation that that witness to the occupation of Egypt turned out to be a presenter himself in Egyptian TV was totally another thing.

A long series of similar charades by other patriots kept coming in and with them rose calls for hanging the minister of information, who was by then considered not less of a criminal then his pal at the Interior who had unleashed his henchmen to kill unarmed civilians. Was Goebbels any less dangerous than Hitler, anyway?

For the January 25 Revolution, toppling official media came right next to toppling the regime, if not hand in hand with it, for the former was a servile satellite of the latter and they both spared no effort to rob the people of any right they should have to know the truth and they both also did their best to clamp down on independent media whenever it went anywhere near exposing their lies. This was bound to change after the revolution, and it did for a while, with people whose faces were banned from showing up on screen or whose names were replaced with “beep” making appearances and issuing statements on all kinds of channels as they proved they were not really the freaks of nature the former government portrayed them to be.

However, we all know that if honeymoons lasted forever the world would be a heaven on earth, for soon the new ruling institution realized that the benefits of freedom of expression are much less than the damages it incurs and the reins had to be pulled only for us to see a reenactment of an old charade that we foolishly thought ended its last season on the day the protagonist stepped down. Amazing how lacking in creativity the new sequel – how many seasons it will last remains to be see – turned out to be.

During Mubarak’s time, every flagrant violation the regime committed was accompanied by two procedures as far as the media is concerned: one, state TV mutates into a relentless propaganda machine; two, satellite channels receive a variety of threats that always revolve around closure in case certain pieces of “malicious” news are reported or certain species of “devious” guests are hosted. The 2010 parliamentary elections, forgery and vote buying and thugs and all the works, offered the starkest of examples, as we were left with the impression that the sweepingly popular members of the National Democratic Party would soon contest in the Congress.

It was hardly different with the massacre of Christian Egyptians on October 9, and no déjà vu has ever felt as powerful. On the same day when dozens of Copts were killed, a presenter at state TV announced that the army was under attack. “And by whom?” she asks. “Not by Israel or any other enemy state, but by a certain group that is also Egyptian.” The “group,” which according to her was willing to set the entire country on fire in order to build one single church, was responsible for killing and injuring several army officers. She, in fact, called upon “patriotic Egyptians” to run to the army’s rescue before the Coptic, unarmed, civilians tore them to pieces. Meanwhile, the bodies of 25 Copts who were shot dead or run over by armored vehicles were ferried to morgues in neighboring hospitals.

The Higher Council for the Armed Forces is a little bit smarter than the former regime, and therefore decided to add a twist to the plot. So, instead of appearing on a TV network whose history of catastrophic reporting made watching The Simpsons more credible, they opted for one of the most watched private channels and the most popular show on this channel and sent two of its senior members to absolve the council and the Egyptian army from any wrongdoing and to reiterate their pledge that not one bullet would be fired at an Egyptian citizen; they then went on forever about how grateful Egyptians should be to every uniform for supporting the revolution and saving the country and all that emotional blackmail in which they, I have to admit, managed to outdo Mubarak’s sacrifice and war blabber.

The script, however, is such a classic, and tampering with a few lines does not mean deviating from the main line of events. A couple of days after the council’s TV appearance, which took place quite a long time after the tragedy – seems they were too much at sea when a change of scenario was necessary –another private channel announced hosting also in its most popular show a famous Egyptian writer to comment on the statements made by council members regarding the killing of Copts. A revolutionary who has never hesitated to speak his mind, Mubarak or no Mubarak, this writer was not by any means expected to say half a word in favor of the army, and popular, as he is, the impact of whatever he was to say on public opinion was expected to be sweepingly forceful. The dictatorship bible is clear on that and so is the Egyptian script. That episode of the show was banned. Right after, the presenter announced suspending the show in protest of “the remarkable deterioration of media freedom” as he himself put it.

“Those in power think they can deny an existing reality or create a non-existent one … and I do not want to be part of this,” he said in the statement he issued right after his withdrawal.

And we keep yawning as we watch the same events unfolding again like we are in some of those harvest cycles in ancient mythology and as we wonder if, like the camera that was posted right outside the TV building and took shots of the same place over and over again, the military council is not even willing to be a bit innovative in showing the people who wears the pants in this country. It also shows how they look down upon their audience, whom they assume are stupid enough not to realize they are watching the same story but with very slight changes, like what happens in Egyptian soap operas when one actress gets pregnant and they have to search for another to play her role in the following season.

As if 30 years of the same performance were not enough! Even Lord of the Rings came in only three parts!

Well, the show’s name translates into “The Last Word,” and it is still remains to be seen whose last word it will be.

A little less than a decade after, the Soviets embarked on a similar campaign that came to be called De-Stalinzation which set out erase Joseph Stalin from national memory whether through repealing his policies, forced labor and the Gulag topping the list, or removing his name from the countless places that allegedly paid him tribute, the city Stalingrad being the most memorable example. To make sure the tyrant would not get more than what he deserved even after death, it was no longer seen fit to have him buried next to the venerated leader of the Bolshevik Revolution and his body was actually removed from Vladimir Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow’s famous Red Square.

Like they taught us in school, Egyptians are the world’s oldest and greatest pioneers and this was no exception. Horemheb spared no effort in defacing any signs of Akhenaten that he could get hold of and before him Thutmose III did pretty much the same with Hatshepsut. Egypt’s contemporary history is not much different — only it was no longer done through defacing statues or ripping off obelisks — for since the July 23 Revolution staged by the army 1952, it had been a relentless battle of legacies with Nasser eliminating everything monarchical and Sadat discarding everything socialist and Mubarak posing as the one and only hero of the October 1973 War let alone the accompanying changes in names of places and the number of allocated pages in school books as well as the marginalization, if not necessarily outright ostracization, of figures seen as representatives of a past era.

A quick look at the above makes it easy to realize that the practice of obliterating representations of a former ruler/regime can fall under two categories based on the initiator: First, an occupying force as in the case of Iraq and Germany and second, a subsequent holder of power as in the case of the Soviet Union and pre-January 25 Egypt. A third category came into being with the ouster of the Egyptian dictatorship and the subsequent call for banning members of the National Democratic Party from political life: the people.

The stark contrast between the first two categories on one hand and the third one on the other hand makes establishing similarities between them as far as procedures and consequences as irrational as comparing the change of regime in Egypt to that in any of the previously mentioned countries or in Egypt itself before the revolution. The anti-Baathist project was not confined to holders of influential positions or former officials known for abuse of power or proven to have been involved in acts of financial corruption or to have taken part in the regime’s repressive practices against its people nor was it limited to a ban on political activities, but rather extended to include each and every single person who belonged to the party and each and every single job they occupied. You didn’t need to be a clairvoyant to foresee the disastrous economic and security aftermath. As for Germany, there is no need to go through the repercussions of the guilt campaign on which the United States embarked in order to make every German citizen suffer for the rest of his or her life for being directly responsible for the atrocities carried out by one single mad person exactly as there is no need for contemplating the effect of this on the way Germany and all Europe handled the Palestinian cause and the creation of Israel. How horrible the Baath Party and the Nazi regime were and how necessary their elimination was for the good of the countries they ruled is beside the point now, for the implementation, how it was done and who did it, was faulty enough to turn a nation’s salvation into its eternal damnation.

In the case of individual rulers taking control of the history of their predecessors —and again how tyrannical they were is also beside the point at the moment — it is not very different from a colonizer that decides to shape the destiny of the colonized in a way which best suits its interests, only this time the perpetrator is the compatriot of the people whose destiny he decides to manipulate.

I am not sure any of this compares to the case of a revolution made by the people and for the people and of those same people demanding that the democracy for which they sacrificed their lives be totally devoid of any of the elements that hampered its existence and encouraged the violation of all its aspects. I am also not sure how enforcing a law that bans members of the National Democratic Party — anyone who enjoys the least degree of sanity knows what the party’s chairman, officials, business tycoons, and henchmen did to make Egypt the mock country it had become before the revolution — from inflicting further damage on a public scene struggling for a clean slate and only doing so following a court ruling that proves them guilty of political misdemeanor in anyway unfair or abusive.

Let us stir away from enumerating the catastrophes this party brought upon the country and its people before the revolution and let us instead focus on two little incidents: One, two months after Mubarak was ousted, the Supreme Administrative Court issued a ruling to dissolve the party and confiscate its property. Two, soon after calls to put into effect a law that gives the Egyptian prosecution and Egyptian citizens the right to take to court any former NDP member against whom they possess evidence of corruption started gaining ground, those “remnants” of Mubarak’s regime announced stocking up on weapons and threatened to stage massive violent protests, block roads and railway lines and even to “occupy” or “declare the independence of,” and I am obviously quoting, the provinces they come from not if they are banned from running in parliamentary elections or holding official positions, but the moment the law is declared effective. If we skip all the crimes the party committed before the revolution and just focus on those two incidents, we can ask ourselves: What will a party that was rendered illegal and whose former members are set to stage a civil war to cover up their shameful past do in a country that is currently in the process of cleaning house? What fate awaits a revolution if the forces determined to crush it are back in power?

It is now time for embarking on a wide-scale process that I have decided to call “De-Bastardization,” one that can finally bestow on Egypt the legitimacy that will never be possible as long as those who robbed it are still around. As long as they are, we will always be those little foundlings in search of a parentage they can count on and take pride in, the helpless babies left at mosque doors and next to trash bins by disgraced mothers who find no other way to pretend they have never sinned.

Not sure anyone enjoys having an orphanage for a home forever.

For a child who was beginning to realize that Santa doesn’t exist, both assumptions about death being the only force that separates lovers or, in the Egyptian film example, too feeble of a force to do so, were purely silver-screen jargon that did nothing but trigger an instantaneous feeling of “My heart will go on” creeping on me from the ruins of some sunken ship.

Less than a year after I had reached those sublime philosophical conclusions, I was introduced to “Henry VIII” in school and I found out that the church did not want to divorce him and that was why he decided to break away from Rome and establish his own church. That was the first time I heard that somebody other than the husband and his wife can decide whether they should break up or not, and that this somebody was as big of an entity as a church made the whole thing much more surreal than the cheesy proclamations of love that I naively assumed held water only in fairy tales and in the imagination of kids under five years of age.

It was then that I learned what a Catholic marriage is, and not a long time after that I also got to know our version of the inseparable bond between a man and a woman that only death can break – the Coptic marriage.

Before I go further into this, let me point out something: this is not about religion. When I praised Tunisian law for banning polygamy and hoped the same could be done in Egypt, several of my friends, male of course, nearly jumped down my throat and accused me of objecting to the laws of God. I always had more or less one answer for them: “I am not going to fall for this trap.”

Indeed, regardless of what the religion is or what kinds of laws it ordains and with all due respect to those who belong to this religion and follow those rules, I find it impossible for me to think about anything other than the purely human aspect of such situations.

The struggle of members of the Coptic Orthodox church to be granted a divorce is not new, and there has been quite a commotion over some who, seeing no other way out, had to convert to Islam when death seemed too unpredictable to count on and when adultery, the only case in which the church grants divorce, simply turned out to be just one of a zillion reasons, and maybe even the least occurring, for ending a marriage.

It is quite intriguing that the recent furor is in fact over an issue that dates back to 1938, when the Coptic Personal Status Law was passed, and to 1971, which witnessed the issuing of the amendment that did away with all but one of the several reasons the law permitted as good reasons for divorce, which included insanity, contracting a fatal disease, imprisonment, physical abuse, desertion for five years … and adultery. This means that if my husband is diagnosed with bipolar disorder, turns out to be HIV-positive, becomes a convicted felon, beats the hell out of me, or has abandoned me on the wedding day, this is still not an excuse for me to ask for divorce and I will be left praying that he cheats on me and that I am able to prove it … or I might even start thinking of fabricating some pornographic shots of him with another woman to get it over and done with.

With the number of Copts seeking divorce or applying for a permit to remarry reaching unprecedented levels – 300,000 cases are reported to be pending at the Clerical Council – and with Egyptians generally becoming more vocal about their grievances following the revolution, the long-overdue explosion eventually struck with full force as hundreds of disgruntled Copts signed a collective resignation from the church and hundreds, maybe thousands, more are expected to follow suit very soon.

I could not help but go back several years ago and think of the time I was willing to give up anything and do whatever it takes to get a divorce, and I keep imagining how I would have had no case at all had the fate of my marriage been contingent upon this law, the original or the amended. Even before going through an experience that made me realize that not wanting to stay in a marriage is enough reason for ending it, I was fully aware that being married to a man who could technically make a wonderful husband does not by any means coerce me into going on with the relationship if at some point I feel that I don’t love him anymore or that we are no longer capable of communicating or any of those reasons that cannot be proven in a court that acknowledges only bruised faces, medical reports, and documented cheating.

What I find really ironic is that the deserters who in the age of Photoshop could have faked adultery charges against their spouses or who could have committed adultery themselves to get out of a failed marriage and who are apparently principled enough not to do either have at the end of the day been called “adulterers” by the pope following their decision to leave the church.

Well, sounds to me like they have now acquired the label that grants them the divorce they have for so long been after and any attempts on their part to refrain from committing a sin have gone down the drain and they end up with the Scarlet Letter anyway. I am not sure they care what they are called at this point, for when you are desperate for regaining your lost freedom, you surprise yourself by how many sacrifices you are willing to make.

The movement that led the resignation campaign is called The Right to Live, and this wraps up in the simplest of words the cause all the Copts are rallying behind and which, unlike the church’s assumptions, is not about defiling a relationship rendered sacred by God nor promoting the disintegration of the family and discarding the values of the community. It is rather about refusing to waive one of the basic rights of any human being: to choose the life to live and whom to live it with. This right need not be supported by evidence nor regulated by law, and it is taking it away that wreaks havoc in society in a manner that is much worse than the scenario envisioned by the church in case whoever wants a divorce gets it, for living with someone you no longer stand might drive one of them to make the “till death do us part” prophecy come true either by inflicting it upon the partner or upon oneself or both. Quite bleak, yet not impossible!

Those who left the church have by no means renounced their Christianity, just like those women who refuse that their husbands take second wives do not renounce her Islam. It is a dignified life they are both after, and if what they fight for happens to be in defiance of God’s laws, then let them be duly punished in the afterlife, but don’t rob them of the right to enjoy the ephemeral here and now and let what “does them part” be what they choose to part for!

I could have gone on forever about how no one was immune, how you do not really need to do anything to meet the same fate and I would have gladly repeated that little piece of advice my mom gave me at a time when I was tempted to look underneath my feet and felt that looking at the bigger picture was too much of an effort: “Never be friends with someone who betrayed another friend before. Very soon, it will be your turn.” However, I decided against it, not for lack of stamina, but rather because I felt I had to be familiar with at least some of the mechanisms which informed that if-it’s-not-happening-to-me logic in order to deliver the message home, and I didn’t, so that was the end of it. I resolutely held on to this firm stance throughout the revolution and I exercised miraculous self-restraint when I heard comments like, “The regime never bothered me in the first place,” “Those people out there do not represent me,” “We were living in peace and this revolution screwed us,” … blah-blah-blah!

Predictably, my “goosfraba” tactic was too fragile and too contrary to my nature to last for long, for as it secretly kept wearing thin with every provocative piece of I-me-and-myself argument I have been hearing since the day the people rose to oust the regime, it officially and irreversibly vanished into dust the moment the emergency law made its heinous comeback and which happens to be the same moment a sizable portion of the population gave it a stately welcome.

Let me skip the bit about how critical a drawback it is for the revolution to see the very law that was amongst the causes of its eruption back even more forceful than before and let us instead focus on the logic — another one to which I have absolutely no clue — behind the support its extension is now garnering and the shamefully meager turn up at last Friday’s “No to the emergency law” protest. Thugs are running amok all over the country, a state of utter lawlessness is rampant, and only a procedure as deterrent as this one can stop them in their tracks and restore security to the Egyptian street, people seem to believe. However, you can’t help but wonder how they have come to reach that firm conviction without asking themselves if the crimes mentioned in the newly-added articles of the law — thuggery, destruction of public property, and possession of weapons — are not punishable by regular law and what difference it will make under which law their perpetrators are arrested if they will be brought to justice anyway. It is also intriguing how they totally overlooked other “crimes” the law targets and in which the entire catastrophe lie. If blocking roads and spreading rumors are rendered illegal activities under the emergency law, then this could mean bidding farewell to two of the most important gains of the revolution: the right to stage protests and freedom of expression and could also mean I should expect to be arrested the moment I set foot in Tahrir Square next Friday or the moment this article is published online. In short, this means we are once more the proud inmates of square one where it seems we are destined to stay and do nothing except lament the dream that never came true.

But who cares? As long as you “walk right by the wall,” as the Egyptian saying goes, keep a low profile, and go about your daily life as if nothing is happening, then you are more than fine. You stay at home when those delusional revolutionaries are protesting and you have never objected to anything the regime, former or incumbent, did or is doing. Therefore, the emergency law is nowhere near and will never be. Not really. Regardless of the crimes listed in the law, and which before the revolution became restricted to terrorism and drug trafficking, the emergency law gives the government and security forces unlimited powers that enable them to detain citizens indefinitely with neither a trial nor even a reason. Does anyone really believe that the tens of thousands of prisoners, some of whom stayed extra-judicially in jail for more than 10 years, were all terrorists and drug dealers? Any if they were, why weren’t they handed court verdicts in accordance with their offences?

Emergency Law for Dummies: The emergency law is when you wake up to find the walls of your house blown away and the clothes you slept in torn to pieces so that you end up naked in the middle of wilderness, waiting to be drenched with rain, struck with thunderbolts, and devoured by wolves. And there is no house made of steel and no clothes woven of iron and no place safe from the storm.

The emergency law is the state of no law … the art of it-could-happen-to-you.

So close that book of fairy tales and put your feet back on the ground, for the emergency law is not the mythic ghoul that kids soon realize has no existence beyond the colorful pages of bedtime nor is Egypt a wonderland of “drink me” bottles and “eat me” cakes and we better realize this before we all fall into that unfathomable rabbit hole that is bound to swallow our dreams, our dignity, and our country.

In fact, it was this billboard, which I first saw one morning as I was driving across Cairo’s main flyover (and which I later found in several other places) that made me realize the craze is far from over: we were in for 100-plus episodes of what women should want and what men will never give and maybe another round of family squabbles and a couple more divorces. I did feel sorry for those Egyptian women who, like the rest of their compatriots of both sexes, seem to be always looking for something that turns out to be too far-fetched.

I don’t know if Egyptian women forgot about Mohanad, but I know I did … until a few days ago when I was driving across the same bridge and looked up at the exact same billboard space to find another Turkish superstar also “coming soon” but with a less tantalizing picture and a rather sober motto: “Together hand in hand for the future.” The new Turk on the block, who I later found on almost half the city’s billboards, was none other than Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

That same day, you would have been hard pressed to find a tweet or a Facebook status that did not in some way or another see the Turkish prime minister as the answer to every single problem Egypt has been facing before and after the ouster of the regime, and maybe since the beginning of time. Like Mohanad put all Egyptian men to shame as far as knowing how to treat a woman was concerned, all potential presidential candidates seemed absolutely incompetent compared to Erdogan and jokes about him winning the elections circulated with the speed of light. Once again everyone was glued to the screen, including men, to hear the champion of democracy in the Middle East lead Egypt’s first steps towards the post-revolution state it is striving to be and to crown Turkey the official Bon Pasteur of the Egyptian people.

The majority of Egyptians made some connection or another between Mohanad and Erdogan if only because they share the same homeland but there were many who scoffed at the comparison. “So is it just because they both are from Turkey?” Well, to a great extent yes. Mohanad is not the only handsome actor Egyptians have seen, but how do you explain that the American Tom Cruise or the Australian Eric Bana or the Spanish Antonio Banderas — all possessing the main attributes of a “beau” and definitely not in any way similar to Egyptian men — have not been half as popular? He is also in no position to compete with award-winning actors, many of whom also happen to be handsome, like the British Colin Firth or the New Zealander Russell Crowe. What makes him that different then? He comes from a country with which Egypt shares historic and cultural ties that go back several centuries ago, a country from where dolmas and Turkish coffee come, a country whose language influences can still be seen in modern Egyptian Arabic. Another factor which undoubtedly plays a major role in this preference for a sizable portion of women is that he is Muslim. Mohanad is, therefore, more “next door” than any of those dudes who speak English, drink coffee from the percolator, or have pancakes for breakfast. If he were real, he would be called “available” or “eligible.”

Erdogan is similarly not a superman. He is a politician, a good one for that matter, but certainly no Mandela or Gandhi and not even a Kemal Ataturk as far as the Turkish people are concerned. But like Mohanad, he is the most accessible option at the moment and an alliance with his country is the most practical at a time when any rapprochement with Israel will be seen as undignified and too much compliance with U.S. policies will be considered a sign of weakness. And as Mohanad is compared to Egyptian men, Erdogan is set in stark contrast with Arab leaders not only for being democratically elected, but also for his latest bravados with Israel, this last factor being of great significance for the Egyptian street and therefore capable alone of making Erdogan a hero of all times.

And like Egyptian women who fantasize about a lover who brings them flowers on the anniversary of every single thing they shared during their first year together, who gets down on his knees to propose, and who plays the violin under their balcony to say he is sorry for something he said or did not say, the Egyptian people dream of a proper leader who assumes power because they want him to and who quits because it is time for him to go.

Mohanad is fictional and Erdogan is real, yet both are equally a figment of the Egyptian people’s imagination: like the first will never alter through a soap opera the way Egyptian men view women, the second will not be capable of effecting from across the Phosphorous the change Egypt needs to create a real democracy. T.V. screens and political borders will remain in the way and billboards will never function as road signs.

So, while you lift your head up to see who the next billboard star is, bear in mind that not all that hits the billboard is the awaited Messiah. Otherwise, that man with the electric shaver or that woman in the pink baby doll would have been our next president and prime minister, respectively!

In the Cairo courtroom, the testimony of prosecution witnesses comes in favor of the defendants, a CD containing recordings of telephone conversations from the Interior Ministry’s control room is destroyed by the prosecutor’s main witness, the minister of interior turns out to have issued no orders to fire at peaceful protestors, riot police were armed with tear gas and water cannons only at the time of the protests, live ammunition was meant only to protect the Interior Ministry from the angry mob, police officers got clear instructions to treat the protestors as their “brothers,” the blatant contradiction between the testimony of the witnesses during interrogations and that of the very same witnesses in court is treated as non-existent.

No phantoms have so far claimed responsibility for that paranormal twist of events that suddenly made angels of demons and that made Egyptians who previously wondered whether it would be the capital punishment or life imprisonment prepare themselves for the possibility of an acquittal.

The glorious inauguration of that new type of judiciary procedure, which I believe should be called the “court of the absurd,” was made all the more festive by the stellar appearance outside the court of Mubarak supporters, who revealed that none other than Iran, Qatar, and Hezbollah started the revolution and none other than the very same countries killed the protestors in cold blood.

This, I have no doubt, would make a decisive testimony, one that is bound to determine the progress of the case, as is the announcement made the following moment that the deposed president is, in fact, a descendant of Prophet Mohamed. Witnesses should also include that Egyptian singer who insists Coca Cola and Vodafone slogans are proof of American and Israeli involvement in the revolution, and perhaps also that Cairo-based Syrian actress who comes on TV every other day to jump down the throat of anybody who accuses Bashar al-Assad of massacring his people, and one cannot forget that mosque preacher who yelled at worshippers that ousting the ruler is against Islam and stressed that every police bullet was shot in self-defense.

It will definitely do the case a great deal of good to try to track down all the crooks who used Photoshop to fabricate videos of security cars running protestors over and snipers shooting at unarmed civilians and to present to the court the criminal records of the so-called “martyrs,” who it turns out are nothing but thugs who ruthlessly attacked police stations and opened the gates of prisons.

“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” and that foul smell has become too sickening to be tolerated. The stink started flirting with our nostrils when Mubarak’s son waved the victory sign from behind bars after the judge declared a ban on broadcasting the trial, and when the former interior minister was greeted like a returning warrior by police officers who chaperoned him in and out of the dock and was always caught on camera with this confident he-who-laughs-last smile that does not become a senior official sentenced to prison and facing a death sentence if proven guilty, and when it was obvious to everyone that the ex-president who could also be hanged still dyes his hair black and is apparently allowed pre-court meetings with his makeup artists, and when his other son had the nerve to pull a piety act and appear in court holding a copy of the Quran.

The last whiff of stench blew much stronger as we saw scapegoats offered at bar on a silver platter and as the murderous officials of the corrupt regime seemed to be as wrongly accused as the wolf thought to have devoured Joseph.

Instead of speculating about how the trial will end and what kind of sentences will be passed, we are left wondering who moves the threads of what now looks like a puppet show and who is presiding over that under-court Hades in which all intrigues to abort the revolution are woven. More than once, we have been victims of sometimes naive optimism. The revolution was a miracle, and so was the first trial in the Arab world of a president at the hands of the people who deposed him.

This blinded us to the unfortunate fact that a regime like that could not be uprooted by the removal of its heads and that thousands of members of that regime would fight till the last breath to, if not to keep, at least to maintain the rules with which it played in order to protect their interests and/or keep their skeletons resting in the closet.

Mubarak and his interior minister are individuals. The trial of the first and the few years in jail handed down to the second do not by default apply to any of the cartels they used to lead and which are still at large and ready to strike all kinds of deals to save themselves through saving their bosses.

But who are “they”? And what kind of influence allows them to change testimony, destroy evidence, and wave a comforting thumbs-up at the defendants so they look that cool and unshaken? In whose interest is it to keep as much as possible of pre-revolution Egypt and fool the credulous public with an illusion of democracy while still remaining the hero of all times?

First of all, it must be an entity or a group or whatever you would like to call it that was part of the regime and whose existence is so interwoven with its practices that it will be gravely threatened if the entire establishment is leveled to the ground, AND it must wield the amount of power required to reverse several of the gains of the revolution or at least refrain from granting revolutionaries their demands, AND it must now be in a position that officially allows it to chart the course of post-revolution Egypt as it sees fit, AND it must at some point to have gained the trust of the regime’s enemies to be able to effect all those changes after the regime was presumably ousted.

Storming into that underworld is far from being an easy task, and lassos might be waiting at every corner, but keeping our hands at the level of our eyes is a skill we seem to have learned well throughout the past few months; courage is one thing Egyptians surely do not lack.

Whoever or whatever our “phantom” is, until finding the way to his lair our voices will echo with the song that will herald the end to its monstrous existence:

Track down this murderer, he must be found!
Hunt out this animal, who runs to ground!